How do I encode...?Lorna A. Priest, 2009-03-31These are questions (and the answers!) people have asked about what the encoding is for various characters in the Unicode standard. This page is also a helpful teaching tool for understanding Unicode.

Orthography development in relation to UnicodeLorna A. Priest, 2004-11-18It is out of our scope to give complete guidelines for developing an orthography. However, we would like to give you a process to work through from a Unicode perspective.
In designing a writing system, one must decide what symbols will be used and how. Here we list Unicode factors that should be taken into account.

Understanding Unicode™ - IPeter Constable, 2001-06-13Unicode is a hot topic these days among computer users that work with multilingual text. They know it is important, and they hear it will solve problems, especially for dealing with text involving multiple scripts. They may not know where to go to learn about it, though. Or they may have read a few things about it and perhaps have seen some code charts, but they are at a point at which they need to gain a firmer understanding so that they can start to develop implementations or create content. This introduction is intended to give such people the basic grounding that they need.

Understanding Unicode™ - IIPeter Constable, 2001-06-13Unicode is a hot topic these days among computer users that work with multilingual text. They know it is important, and they hear it will solve problems, especially for dealing with text involving multiple scripts. They may not know where to go to learn about it, though. Or they may have read a few things about it and perhaps have seen some code charts, but they are at a point at which they need to gain a firmer understanding so that they can start to develop implementations or create content. This introduction is intended to give such people the basic grounding that they need.

Why are my quote marks backwards?Bob Hallissy, 2009-03-02If you work with right-to-left text in Unicode and have certain quote marks in your text, then this article is for you. More specifically: if you suddenly see your smart quotes reverse direction, this article will explain why and what to do (or not do) about it.

Encoding the Vai Syllabary in UnicodeLorna A. Priest, 2004-12-01This document is a reference for those who are interested in encoding the Vai Syllabary in Unicode. It contains information compiled during the time SIL was working on the Vai fonts.

Is Unicode ready for you?Albert Bickford, Jim Brase and Lorna Priest, 2007-05-11This article will help you decide whether Unicode will meet the needs for your given orthography or character needs.

Sequence Checking in Thai & LaoMartin Hosken, 2008-04-25With the Unicode character set being so large, it is natural for system and application implementors to want to provide some mechanism for indicating what are clearly illegal sequences of Unicode characters...

Meteg and Siluq in the BHSJoan Wardell and Christopher Samuel, 2003-09-30This short discussion on Meteg in biblical Hebrew explains how to encode various placements with a single codepoint.

Reversed Nun in the BHSJoan Wardell, Peter Constable and Christopher Samuel, 2003-11-05This short discussion of reversed nun explains how it is used in the Ezra SIL fonts.

Puncta in the BHSJoan Wardell and Christopher Samuel, 2003-09-30This short discussion on Puncta dots in biblical Hebrew and Unicode explains how they are used in the Ezra SIL fonts.

Unicode Word Macros TemplatePeter G. Constable, 2007-11-14This template provides some VBA macros designed to deal with various Unicode-related issues in Word 97 and later versions. These include providing a means to display the Unicode value of any character, to enter any Unicode character, and to search for any Unicode character. Each of the macros can be accessed from a toolbar that is provided.

Character Stories: U+2024 ONE DOT LEADERPeter Constable, 2003-06-02U+2024 ONE DOT LEADER is a graphic character, whose glyph consists of a small baseline dot, and whose General Category is Po (Other Punctuation).

Tutorials

Unicode Transition Tutorial LinksLorna A. Priest, 2009-02-17Because of special character needs, SIL teams have long used custom encoded fonts. This was often the only solution and worked fairly well until newer software began "breaking" our solutions. Unicode obviates the need for custom encoded fonts. The tutorials in this section were developed for helping people in their transition to Unicode. You will find tools for helping you figure out what the Unicode encoding should be, tutorials and tools for actually converting legacy encoded documents to Unicode encoded documents and tutorials to help you with keyboarding issues.

Helpful Utilities

UnicodeChecker — UnicodeChecker for Mac OS X is an application that displays information for every code point from the Unicode Standard.

Unibook — The Unibook Character browser is a small utility for offline viewing of the character charts and character properties for The Unicode Standard.

http://www.ling.upenn.edu/unicode/ — Unicode Character Finder is webpage which allows you to search for Unicode characters, view characters by Unicode block and copy characters to the clipboard for use in other applications.